September 27th

Quick! It's that day of the week again, which means it's time for a decidedly laissez-faire overview of the game criticism blogosphere. And don't forget: you can always send links to Critical Distance's twitter account for inclusion in TWIVGB.

After last week's acclaimed critique of The Joker and ludonarrative dissonance in Batman: Arkham Asylum, Michel McBride looks at the composition/execution cycle (as originally put forward by Clint Hocking in a GDC presentation) as played out in the game.

Michael Abbot writes about the critical reception to two very different DS games in 'I'll Take Refinement', namely Scribblenautsand Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. He makes an interesting statement that I'd like to highlight:

Scribblenauts was, for awhile, the talk of the town in a way that a new M&L game could never be… [but] Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (despite its cumbersome title) is a smashingly good game, and it deserves at least as much critical consideration as Scribblenauts – or any other game for that matter.

Worth thinking about: but are all games really equally worthy of discussion and scrutiny? I'm sure there are things to be gained from and appreciated in any game, but I'm not as convinced as Michael, and I told him as much. He followed up with 'The Joy of Iteration'.

On the one hand, it is tempting to celebrate this new ignorance. If a more accepting and less bigoted society is one we want to live in, then there is some sign of cultural success when a racial slur obsolesces. …But on the other hand, this very neglect points to a social ill even worse than racism itself: disavowal. We must strive for more than the destruction of stereotype, slur, and other visible signs of bigotry, as if eliminating the symptoms also cures the cause.

From the fusion of musical styles, to the alarming bumps and thumps, and particularly the utterly alien sound of the smoke monsters, it's an absolute aural feast. That is, a particularly poisonous one that ravages your insides. The whole mod sounds unthinkably horrendous, in the most brilliant way you could ever imagine.

I played most of it through in one night and can attest; it will disturb you quite a bit, or annoy you with its frequent use of blasts of white noise.

GTA5 would, I/they explained, feature apartments across the city into which your character could walk, and rather than entering the living cutscenes of the previous games, he'd face a kind of dynamic soap opera, which would resolve in a mission. Each of the apartments contained the characters of popular sitcom, Friends, but these were placeholders, so as not to spoil the game for viewers.

…the series has always played in these political waters, but from its Blackwater-esque PMCs to its insurgency escalating in proportion and in response to corporate-statism, it's Iraq the game. It's at times like this Volition should think itself lucky that no-one actually takes videogames seriously. If someone had made Red Faction as a film, make no mistake: it'd be pilloried as anti-American propaganda.

About thirty levels into World of Warcraft, I realized that I did not need to read two paragraphs of text to justify killing twenty specific woodland creatures. It was at this point that I realized something crucial: in these two paragraphs, the only words that held any interest for me were “kill” and “woodland creatures.” It was very liberating to know that aside from the very few quests that tied into a larger narrative, I wasn't missing anything at all.

That does sound good. I don't think it took me 30 levels to figure out that most of the text in WoW was superfluous, however. I think it probably took me about 3. Don’t forget that you too can send links to the Critical Distance twitter account for weekly inclusion in TWIVGB.